A week later, they hit the supply convoy again. This time, the government in the north had sent more trucks and more men. Lincoln moved the ambush point up a couple of kilometers and also brought more men. His side had two KIAs, but on the Pathet side there were no survivors.
Ten days later—the Pathet Lao having altered their delivery schedule—they took down another one. Still more trucks and more men, but with essentially the same results.
Three days after that, still another convoy came through, this time with a dozen trucks and a few hundred men. It passed without incident and went to the camp.
But while it was there, Lincoln and his men cratered the road out with heavy explosives. When the convoy tried to leave, it was unable to. Until the road could be repaired—a dangerous proposition, thanks to Hmong snipers who made it so—all the additional soldiers who had accompanied the convoy had to be housed and fed at the camp.
Lincoln had to laugh. Once the idea had occurred to him to become an insufferable pest, it had seemed like a stroke of genius.
By now, Lincoln had contacts in Hmong villages ringing the entire Plain of Jars. Scouts from the northern villages kept an eye on the road and alerted him or Koob whenever a convoy was on the roll, giving them a day’s warning before it would reach the camp. On the night before the next convoy’s arrival, Vang Khom’s own scouts—who kept the post in sight almost all the time—reported that a couple hundred men had gone up the road, getting in place to disrupt any ambush attempt.
Lincoln didn’t plan any more ambushes for a while, though. Instead, this was the moment he was waiting for. He sent a half-dozen well-trained sappers through the wire, using techniques similar to the ones he had used to kill Colonel Phan. With so many soldiers out on the road, security was sparse. They set timed charges at each of the eight generators that powered the camp, the backup generators, and the underground storage tanks for the motor pool’s gasoline supplies, and slipped out of the place before their presence was detected. At precisely two o’clock in the morning—Lincoln was waiting a few clicks south, checking his watch every couple of minutes—the bombs went off. Lincoln covered the distance quickly and saw that with the exception of the not-yet-extinguished fires, there wasn’t a single light in the camp.
The immediate result wasn’t disastrous for the camp. But the effect was meant to be psychological, not physical. Some soldiers would have died in those blasts. Worse was the knowledge the survivors had, that those who had perpetrated the attack had been inside their fences. The new, larger force, the expanded security measures, all meant nothing. They would be demoralized and frightened.
Being without electricity would be inconvenient for a few days, until they could rebuild generators or get new ones. Being without fuel for their vehicles would be worse, and it meant the next convoy would have to include fuel trucks. That might make for an interesting target, Lincoln thought.
Was it too soon to start hitting convoys again?
Probably so. Except one thing made the fuel trucks an especially tempting target.
With that in mind, he drew together three hundred of his Hmong warriors and set up an ambush a couple dozen kilometers north of the intersection—far from where any would be expected, based on past history. He let the first convoy pass through unmolested, because there were no fuel tankers in it. It had probably been on the move, or close to it, before word of the sapper attacks reached the north.
The next convoy, though, included four tanker trucks full of gasoline. This one, Lincoln stopped. A brief firefight ensued, and both sides took casualties. But when the smoke cleared, a dozen Pathet Lao vehicles and about a hundred and fifty Pathet soldiers were dead, and Lincoln’s people were behind the wheels of the four tankers.
It wouldn’t take long for word of the ambush to reach the camp or headquarters in the north. But Lincoln’s plan didn’t require much time.
The camp’s water came from a river that cut through the Plain of Jars, on its way from the Laotian mountains and into Vietnam, then to the sea. The road passed over the river about four clicks from the camp. A little too close for comfort, if the garrison was responding to the ambush. Lincoln didn’t think word would have reached them that quickly, and the action had taken place too far away for them to have heard anything.
He drove the first truck, and trusted drivers—there were not many among the villagers, few of whom had ever piloted big rigs—handled the other three. They left the road before the bridge and steered them into the river. Once the vehicles were all in place, they opened the tanks and ruptured them where they could without causing sparks or explosions. Fuel spilled into the river water. Within minutes, the smell was too powerful to bear, and Lincoln and his Hmong scattered back to their individual mountain redoubts.
The gas probably wouldn’t poison the water all the way into Vietnam, Lincoln figured—it would be diluted in time—but it had to affect only the people in the camp. Either they would drink it and get sick, or they would avoid it and become dehydrated. When the next rain came, they would capture what they could of that, but without dedicated storage tanks, it would provide only brief respite.
Again, the idea was psychological warfare. Lincoln wanted the soldiers to know that nothing was safe—not their defenses, not their electricity, not their drinking water. Soon, he hoped, the desertions would start.
To speed up that process even more, he started sending Hmong squads out to the post at night with mortars. They would lob in a few rounds, do whatever damage they could, then fade into the darkness. It was another tactic borrowed from the VC, designed to keep the men inside the wire anxious and scared. By the time the soldiers could react to the incoming rounds, those who fired them would be gone. The next night, they would wonder—will it happen again? And it would, but not on any set schedule. Sometimes four or five nights would pass without any attack. Sometimes it would happen every night for a week, then stop.
After a few days of that, Lincoln’s scouts reported that they had seen soldiers slipping away from the camp during the night. Others went out on patrol, then slipped quietly into the jungle while their comrades weren’t looking and never returned. First it was a trickle, then a stream, and finally a flood. Whether they went north or south or into Vietnam was of no concern to Lincoln—they were no longer threats, and that was all that mattered.
Little by little, he was knocking the pins out from underneath Colonel Sun.
Soon, it would be time to finish the job.